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CBRE Group Inc. tenant rep David Ritchey says tech companies tend to outgrow their current office space much quicker than other companies, prefer more open layouts and seek out non-traditional business areas like D.C.'s NoMa.

As the tech community in D.C. grows from a seed to what could be a mighty oak, one of the nation’s largest real estate brokerages is aiming to position itself to help foster that growth in the Washington region and nationally.

CBRE Group Inc. has launched a new technology and media practice to help firms plot their real estate needs both in the near term and over the long run in the top 20 markets in the country based on job and real estate growth. D.C. joins powerhouses like San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Austin, Texas on that list.

The brokerage has tapped CBRE tenant rep David Ritchey, a first vice president with the firm and son of Boston Properties Executive Vice President Ray Ritchey, to oversee the practice in the D.C. region. The younger Ritchey, who started out representing tech firms in San Francisco in 1999 with the CAC Group, said the practice is being launched with a recognition that brokerages need to take a new approach to representing tech firms than they have with law firms or other businesses.

“It’s a pretty exciting time servicing the needs of the tech community,” Ritchey said. “It’s just completely different from other industries, and looking ahead, I think this industry sector is going to have a profound influence on the Washington, D.C. real estate industry. It’s really a complete inverse from the commercial office perspective that we’ve seen in the past.”

In contrast to more traditional office users, Ritchey said, they tend to outgrow their current space much quicker, prefer more open layouts, and seek out non-traditional business areas like NoMa and Shaw in the District. In many cases, those firms also want more flexibility in their leases to allow for shorter terms and greater ability to expand as needed.

By the numbers, D.C. earned the last spot on CBRE’s ranking of the nation’s top 20 high-tech markets ranked by job growth rates, with an increase of 0.8 percent from 2011 to 2013. That compares to 51.1 percent for San Francisco during the same period and to 34.2 percent for Austin. Baltimore ranked 15th, with job growth of 10 percent, followed by Philadelphia at 4 percent. Out of fairness, Ritchey noted, that figure includes jobs in the federal sphere, including many slashed by the government or by its contractors, and would likely have been higher when factoring those positions out.

But CBRE has its own global network to draw from and also has its own connections in the D.C. region as well, representing Opower, EverFi and WeddingWire among others. With the new platform, Ritchey said, CBRE will be able to draw together the expertise of tech-centric brokers from across the country, many of whom have reached the point where they have locations in more than one city.

Commercial real estate experts familiar with the elder Ritchey might still be wondering why David Ritchey has opted to make his living representing tenants rather than developers given the path charted by the elder Ritchey, and in truth, he dabbled his feet in that arena for a time. The younger Ritchey moved on from CAC to grad school at MIT, also an enclave for the tech industry, where he earned a master’s degree in real estate development in 2004. From there he went to work for Clark Realty Capital, where he worked as a development executive in the D.C. region for a little more than five years before concluding his passion was in the tenant advisory business. He left Clark in January 2010 and has been with CBRE since then.

Daniel J. Sernovitz covers commercial real estate.

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